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Sept. 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:49
426 Israel and Power

Ways to view the virtues of the sons of Abraham

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Steph.
It is 8:20.
On the 22nd... do do do do do do do today's do the birthday.
On the 22nd of...
September 2006.
And I hope you're having a fabulous life.
And I'm going to try and see Natasha Atlas tonight, who is a, I guess a British slash Moroccan singer, who is pretty good, if you get a chance.
She does, I guess the reason that I got into her to begin with was I've always sort of liked Moroccan or that sort of Middle Eastern type of music.
And, I guess I was turned on to it about, uh, gosh, 27 years ago?
25 years ago? That long?
Oh my gosh! No, no, no, not quite.
17, 18 years ago, by the soundtrack to The Last Semptation of Christ, which was done by Peter Gabriel, Ravi Shankar, and a group of other people.
And so I kind of got into it, listened to it sort of off and on since then, and I was listening to the first, boy, like the first minute of a song called Mr.
Neek, which I don't really like the last three quarters of, but the first bit with Natasha Atlas singing is just, whoo, gives you chills.
It gives you chills.
Chills. Anyway, so I hope to get to see her tonight.
I just found out yesterday, through flipping through la newspaper, that she was playing in town tonight, and so we're going to try and get some tickets and go and catch the belly-wriggling Moroccan singer.
So, if you get a chance to listen to some of her stuff, is no bad, man.
Alright, so...
We are going to chat this morning...
About Israel-ish.
About the ish of Israel.
The kinda-kinda of Israel.
Now, my knowledge of Israel, not huge, never been.
I struggled through the first half of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel and found that I just could not get interested in the minutiae of land transfers In the 1920s in Palestine.
Funny that. I mean, you'd think that would be pretty gripping.
No luck for the Stephmeister, I guess you could say, to get through that kind of stuff.
Because, you know, when you disagree with the premise, the minutiae become pretty unimportant.
Like, if you agree with the premise, then the minutiae become pretty important.
And, you know, when I was talking yesterday, I guess sort of giggling yesterday about...
I'm in no way, shape, or form competent to say whether evolution is true or false, but I certainly do respect the methodology of Science and its approach to evolution, and I can't remember who, some philosopher said that evolution was like the single best idea any human being has ever had,
which I thought both was pretty cool, and in a mad sort of vanity kind of gauntlet that was thrown down in front of me, but I'm not going to say that I've managed to get any of that so much done yet.
But The question around Israel is...
You know, when you get into anarcho-capitalism, when you get into the idea that it doesn't really matter what the state says or what the state does, that the state is bad, that the state is an evil institution...
Then, when people say, well, you should like this state instead of that state, it sort of, to me at least, it comes across kind of like, you should like this slave owner over that slave owner.
This slave owner is a whole lot better than that slave owner.
And, of course, that's entirely true.
I have no doubt that in the bowels of slave-owning cultures were a few shining moral polyps of virtuous, I shouldn't really put it quite that far, of less evil slave owners.
And the question, sort of, About which state you support.
Do you support your own state or the state of some other country or some ideal state as the monarchists do that's small and tidy and full of nothing but vats of virtue that people sink into?
It's very much the question of what is the best slave owner?
What is the best state is what is the best slave owner?
And I have no doubt at all That there were better and worse slave owners, right?
So, if you have to be a slave, you want to go over to Smiley McSmiley's rather than Whippy McWhippies to be a slave.
And maybe there were slave owners who took an interest in their slaves and, you know, tried to get them educated.
And maybe, just maybe, there were even people...
Who went down to ye olde slave auctions and outbid mean and bad slave owners so that they could buy their slaves and end up with them not going to these evil slave guys' place and so on.
Maybe there were the slave women who were raped, I imagine, on a fairly constant basis Maybe there were, I don't know, maybe even pious Christians who went and bought said women from the slave owners and paid a high price for them so that they could set them up in slave nunneries or something like that.
Who knows? And I don't think there's anything wrong with that myself.
You know, somebody's got to do that stuff.
It's not me, but somebody's got to do it, and there's nothing wrong with it being done.
Certainly, if I'm a slave woman who's getting raped three times a week, then I'm going to rather, or I'm going to prefer to have someone by me and set me up in a nunnery so that I'm away from my rapist.
I'm going to prefer that, I'm guessing.
Over some bald guy in the future in a Volvo talking about the evils of slavery, which isn't going to help me a whole hell of a lot in my current situation.
So, I can certainly understand that there is immediate and practical value in assessing which slave owners are, at present, The least egregious, the least evil, the least vicious, the least whatever.
And of course, that's what I've done.
I mean, if you said to me, Steph, you can go and live in any country in the world, I would choose Canada, the land of extreme temperatures.
Now, if I could live in any place in the world, gee, I don't know, some of the scenes in New Zealand where they filmed Lord of the Rings, maybe something like that.
But I certainly would not choose Sierra Leone or Ghana or even Saudi Arabia or any of these sorts of places.
I wouldn't choose because I'd have nothing to say to the people.
Who I had anything to do with, they'd all be, like, even more deranged.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't have a whole lot to say to the people in Canada, either, who are a bunch of, you know, pro-statist, medieval-thinking kind of propaganda robots, which is not their fault.
I mean, they're just, they don't have that particular part of the brain that processes philosophy, and there's no reason why they should any more than I should be a great mathematician, or even a remotely competent mathematician.
So, of course, that's what I've done in my life.
And... Oh, I can't remember if I've told everyone this before.
One of the reasons that we fled England to come to Canada was because my mother was afraid of communism, and so we fled Canada right before the Thatcher Revolution and came...
Sorry, we fled England right before the Thatcher Revolution and came to Canada, the mad socialist paradise.
Ah, my mother. Always looking ahead.
Anyway. So, yes, I do understand that.
And when you look at the shithole that is the Middle East, and...
You pretend that Israel doesn't get a vast amount of funding from non-Israeli Jews and from the United States, and I don't know what other countries funded.
Hey, maybe Saudi Arabia does, because it likes having a nice enemy close in their bosom.
But if you just sort of look at what Israel says and the general impression that you have of Israel compared to some theocratic crap hole like Iran, sure, absolutely.
I would no question, no doubt, prefer to live in Israel than I would prefer to live in Iran.
No question, no doubt.
I think the comedians are probably a lot funnier, too.
I can't imagine there's a whole lot of funny ayatollahs.
But, you know, Jews are pretty damn funny at times.
Anyway, so, with the question of Israel, though, as a whole, and, you know, everybody knows, sort of the...
it was brought about through a fair amount of...
David Ben-Gurion ran around and bribed and threatened all of the world leaders to create Israel.
Everyone said, oh, it's so funny what people give as motives to world leaders.
I mean, they really do.
It's just quite amazing. They think that George Bush has a vision for the Middle East.
I mean, that's just funny. I mean, George Bush doesn't even know what he's doing two days from now until his handlers tell him.
But he has a vision for the Middle East, or he has some vision for America, or what did he spend the whole month before 9-11 doing, sitting on his ranch trying to work out stem cell research, trying to bridge the gap between science and faith?
The guy can barely bridge the gap between AA and his car.
But when we see power, we assume depth.
It's a very common thing.
If you've ever met politicians, and I've only met a few up front and up close and personal, I mean, they're extraordinarily empty and frightened and defensive and vain people, as a lot of people tend to be.
I mean, they're pure false self, of course.
But when we see all of this immense power, We imagine that there's depth and virtue.
Because we look at our own lives and we say, gee, you know, I don't have any power relative to somebody like George Bush or Tony Blair or whoever.
And so, these people must be somehow just greater than I am, because look at all the power they have.
And it certainly is my belief that sort of one of the main fundamental reasons...
Of course, it comes from parents. I'm not going to bother talking about that.
But one of the main beliefs that I have is that people have power over us because we think we're small.
People have power over us Because we think we're small.
Our lack of assertiveness and self-esteem, which is pounded out of us, don't get me wrong, it's not like we're just a bunch of cowards, but it is our lack of self-esteem, it is our lack of a sense of our own power and efficacy, that creates the vacuum of That inflates power.
Power is not inflated from within.
Power is expanded from without by an increasing vacuum and lack of self-confidence on the part of the people.
Power is an effect of the destruction of children, as I've talked about from day one.
Sorry, day one of this podcast, not day one of my intellectual journey, which, thank God, podcasts weren't invented ten years ago.
Oh my God, would I have some backtracking to do.
It's all been so perfectly coincidental.
I'll talk about that in some other podcasts, but to me it's quite remarkable.
But... So I was looking at a picture of Tony Blair and George Bush striding along sort of purposefully and people parting before them and people running after them and jabbering questions at them.
And they're just two pretty average kind of guys, right?
One of them would have made a fairly competent manager of a small to maybe medium-sized car dealership.
And the other one would have made a lawyer who would perhaps do well in entertainment disputes.
But, you know, leaders of the free world?
Please. Come on.
I mean, people. It's such a complete fantasy.
But they are propelled, right?
If you sort of want to look at this as a visual metaphor, we'll just say take the Beebe brothers, right?
Bush and Blair. They are propelled forward by people parting in front of them.
The same way if you're sitting in a stream, you can create a little mini waterfall by parting all of the water.
It's going to cause the water upstream to rush into your cupped hands.
These people are propelled forward by the deference that is granted to them by the people who think that they're great.
Similarly, the people chasing after them to ask them questions also are the ones who inflate them power, who cause their power.
Just think of the press secretary, Artie Fleiss, I can't remember the new press secretary's name.
There would be no one standing on that stupid little, really fake-looking podium in the White House.
There would be nobody standing there talking to the press if the press wasn't there, right?
If someone said, hey, nobody from the press has shown up, then the press secretary wouldn't go and hold an empty press conference, right?
Probably wouldn't do it if the rumors are third full.
So... The guy who's in the press room is there because the reporters are there.
He is drawn there because the reporters are there.
He has to be there because the reporters are there.
He is there. His position is created by the reporters.
If nobody showed up to report on it, then the guy wouldn't even be there.
And I was...
Oh, I can't remember. There was some...
I quite enjoyed Bridget Jones' Diary, and I've read a couple of other chiclet books since then, and the Sophie Kinsella series is not too, too bad.
And I think it's in the Sophie Kinsella series, the Shopaholic series, where...
One woman is absolutely desperate, and I think it's only mentioned briefly in passing, is absolutely desperate to get Sherry Blair, the wife of the Prime Minister or some astrological quack nutjob woman, To come to her party, because that would be an extraordinary social coup, right?
that would raise her standing with her clucky hen friends that she got Sherry Blair to come to one of her parties.
And everyone, of course, would flock around Sherry Blair and would gaze at her with shining rapt wonder and adoration and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And this is the filthy underside of the British social system, the caste system that the British have.
I've talked about this briefly before.
The aristocrats are still the center of British social life, which means that violent and vile parasitism is the center of social excellence in the British world, and that mutates and warps everything.
Christina was on the weekend reading...
Boy, for our non-Canadian listeners, let me give a 30-second intro.
We had a rather ferret-faced and oddly assertive prime minister in the 70s called Pierre Trudeau, and he was so popular...
Trudeau mania was the thing, and he was like, I don't know, in his 40s, and he married a 22-year-old girl, and then she ended up, Margaret Trudeau, and she ended up sleeping around with the Rolling Stones or something like that.
They got a vicious divorce.
He had three kids.
I think they're all sons. One of them died in a skiing accident.
The other one makes movies for the government TV network.
I mean, a bunch of filthy statists, of course, all of them, right?
And this guy was a successful lawyer in Quebec.
Almost all of the politicians who are prime ministers have or have backing from Quebec.
Quebec's the real thorn in the poor of the glorious unity that is Canada.
I may say that's when a bunch of jackals all tearing at each other the way that you would absolutely expect.
Of course, the family fortune has been made, and none of his kids have to work, which is rather remarkable when you think that the man was prime minister for, I don't know, eight or so years, and you don't make a whole lot of money as a prime minister.
But like all people who gain power, there's an enormous amount of untraceable money that suddenly and magically pops into his bank account, and lo and behold, his children never have to work, and he just does hunky-dory.
You can look at somebody like...
Oh, what's his head?
Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani has the same sort of thing.
He had a chauffeur who then became a favorite of his who then became a millionaire.
These guys all have inside stock trading tips.
Of course, the $9 billion that just sort of went vaguely missing in Iraq ended up in the hands of some people.
That doesn't fall off the back of the truck and you don't turn around to go and get it.
So, I mean, the amount of money, black money that's floating around, or blood money that's floating around in politics is staggering, and of course, politics is a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed cover stories for getting access to this massive slush fund of taxpayer money.
But this woman was featured on the cover of a Canadian version of Chatelaine's, the woman who married one of his sons.
Justin Trudeau, I think, was the son.
Oh, something we should edit out because...
Excuse me.
See, I turned my head away from the mic so it wouldn't get an ear infection.
Isn't that nice of me? And Christina was reading this, and it was all about how wonderful life was, and on the cover of the magazine, she was in a big fluffy sweater with a high, sort of rolled up turtleneck, and she was literally holding a puppy.
She was holding a puppy.
Of course, because Chatelaine is one of these intensely sentimental women's magazines.
And so, oh, she talks about this, she talks about that.
Of course, you know, when people look at this stuff in the future, their stomachs will literally turn.
Can you imagine Stalin's daughter sitting on the cover of a magazine, a Pravda, not the fashion designer, but the newspaper, holding a puppy and looking dewy-eyed up through her fringes into the camera?
Wearing a big fluffy sweater that made her look like 12 years old and, you know, with a shy smile.
I mean, the brutality that's involved in that kind of sentimentality and the cover-up for essentially a mafia family is just astounding.
It's just astounding.
It's like putting a mob boss with a puppy on the cover of GQ, right?
People would just be like, what the hell are you people doing?
Is that irony? Is that, like, what is that?
So anyway, I just thought that was kind of funny.
But politicians are created by the fact that assholes are willing to put them on the covers and their daughter-in-laws on the cover of magazines.
The fact that people look up to Bush is why Bush exists.
And believe it or not, we will get back to Israel very quickly, although perhaps not too lengthily.
But in the realm of Israel.
Israel was created through an enormous amount of bribery and threats and corruption and blackmail and, you know, has secured itself through extraordinary amounts of violence and chose to occupy itself deep into the heart of enemy territory.
And this, of course, is something that is perfectly natural.
All tribes want to have lots of enemies because otherwise, what the hell is the point of being in the tribe or having a tribe?
And so it's sort of like if a white guy who's not, who sort of has had a historical battle with black people, and who, you know, while outwardly preaching reconciliation, kind of secretly doesn't really like and has no respect for blacks, if he goes and gets himself a Goes and buys at a cut rate through threatening, through working through politics, right?
There's a big beautiful house in the middle of Harlem and this vaguely racist white guy goes and buys this house and he gets a really sweet deal through his political manipulations, which the black people don't have access to.
Then he goes and sits there and of course he's going to draw hostility to him.
It doesn't mean that the blacks are right, but this guy surely had some idea what was coming and chose to buy the best house in a black neighborhood through political means rather than even an open market competitive bid,
which blacks would be allowed to get as well, but instead ran to the city council just as the way the Jews ran to the UN. And of course, yeah, there's going to be lots of resulting violence that's never going to end, because the blacks aren't going to forget it, and this guy claims all the virtue in the world for being there, and that he's the best guy ever.
He is the chosen one, let's just say, to work out the metaphor of the Jewish chosen people a little bit in more detail.
But are people really going to have an enormous amount of sympathy for this man, who finagled the best house away from the land of his historical enemies, who he treats with contempt?
Of course there's going to be violence.
I mean, it's absolutely inevitable.
And so we have somebody who's posted on the board who went to a pro-Jewish rally and put in lots of photos of people cheering and having a great time at this pro-Israeli rally and talked about how great Israel was and so on.
And, of course, I asked some questions.
I didn't disagree with anything he said.
I just said, okay, well, can you define for me what is good?
And he said, well, Israel doesn't kill people.
Israel treats people, he puts them in jail rather than kills them.
And Israel always tries to minimize the casualties of the Muslims, the civilian casualties.
And Israel...
What else?
Oh, Israel puts all of its military installations far away from civilian areas, but all the Arabs ever do is surround their military installations with civilian people so that people get killed and then Israel gets blamed and blah, but all the Arabs ever do is surround their military installations with civilian And there was more, but you get sort of the general idea.
And again, this all being said, I generally prefer the company of Jews to the company of Muslims.
That may be my bias or it just may be because we have a little bit more in common, my family history and so on.
And I find that Jews are more self-critical than Muslims are.
We can go into all of that another time.
So all of that having been said, I still think it's fair to question some of the assumptions that are put in around this kind of situation.
So, of course, this gentleman says that Israel doesn't go around assassinating people, and I, of course, had to ask if the book, and I guess movie, Munich was pure propaganda and fantasy.
I don't know, right? It's just some story someone said.
It could be a fairy tale.
It could be true. I have no way of really knowing.
And he said, well, yes, okay, that was true, but that was sort of in retaliation and so on.
And so, okay, that's fine.
Now, the other question, which I haven't got around to, I cast him a couple of other questions that he had answers to, and I didn't find them too satisfying.
But of course, one of the central questions is that it's the problem of finding a cause for this kind of stuff, right?
It's always the problem of finding any kind of first cause for this kind of stuff.
So, he says that That the Muslims stick all of their civilians around military installations.
Of course, that's rather interesting. If you were a civilian, say, and you were, say, free, it seems to me rather doubtful that you would end up wanting to go and live around a military base that you knew would be the first thing to be bombed, should there ever be a conflict, of which there is pretty regularly in the Middle East.
So, it's pretty hard to understand the motivation of why Muslims would go and do this kind of stuff, right?
Why would a Muslim person go and live around some sort of military installation?
It wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense.
But, of course, they're forced there by the Muslim government, right?
So, you can't really blame the Muslim population...
For being stuck around these military installations.
I mean, assuming this is true.
I don't even know if it's true. It's not like I've gone and visually inspected them or anything.
But let's assume that it's true.
Then, of course, it's the Muslim government that Israel has a problem with.
And, of course, I do believe that the Muslim government is in place because the Muslims believe in these crazy things.
But, of course, they're trained and beaten and aggressed against from when they're children to believe in this kind of stuff.
And they simply can have no place and no survival in that society, or at least very little.
Actually, no, I shouldn't quite say that, because when I was reading the V.S. Naipaul book, There were examples of communist people who lived in Muslim countries who didn't go to prayer, so yes.
But I think it's around family for sure.
You simply can't get away with that sort of stuff around family.
But... It's the Muslim government, then, that the Israeli government has a problem with.
And, you know, it's like a farmer who lets out all of his wolves, who then eats your sheep.
You don't go and shoot the wolves, of course.
You get angry at the government itself.
That would sort of make sense.
You don't get mad at the wolves.
You get mad at the farmer who let the wolves out, who attacked your sheep, or something like that.
So then the question, of course, becomes...
Why are the Muslims different from the Jews?
I mean, this is sort of a very fundamental and obvious question.
If you have a lot of problems with a particular group...
Oh, look at that.
I'm just driving past the synagogue.
If you have problems with a particular group, then it would seem to me that it would be fairly useful...
To try and figure out why that group was the way that it was.
And not in terms of us versus them, but in terms of true versus false.
Because there's an enormous amount of tribalism inherent in this kind of stuff.
It's like, our country is better than your country.
We're good, you're bad.
Because the question of good or bad is something that needs to be universalized if you're going to apply it to another country.
I mean, if you're a radical relativist, well, I mean, we've gone into this before.
You're never going to have any luck.
Putting moral judgments on other people, even if you're a radical relativist, you will then have to have problems with people who impose their views on others, like the Muslim governments on the Muslim people.
So, this sort of we're good and you're bad is petty and irrational and base tribalism, and corrupt, to be perfectly frank, in my opinion.
And... What you need to do is you need to define what is good and what is bad, right?
Well, obviously, belief in irrational things is bad.
I mean, that would sort of be my opinion, because certainly when Jews talk about anti-Semites, they don't say, well, yes, we are trying to get the Zog, the Zionist organizational government or whatever the hell it is, this protocol of the elders of Zion.
We really are trying to do that, but we would kind of hope that we wouldn't get caught.
And so people who are anti-Semitic, we don't have any problem with the facts.
We just have a problem with being caught, right?
That's not what Jews say. Who would, right?
They say, well, it's not true.
It's bigotry, right?
They believe things about us which aren't true, and therefore that's bigotry, which, of course, I would perfectly agree with.
But, of course, Jews believe things about Jews that aren't true, which, of course, is bigotry.
The very existence of Judaism, as any other sort of irrational tribal cult, is based on irrational ideas.
Right? So, it is as bigoted to say we are the chosen people as it is to say that Jews are evil, and only Jews are evil, or something like that.
Right? I mean, none of it makes any sense.
So, of course, this is one of the major thorny issues that you have in the Middle East, that everybody's in a glass house.
Now, some people's glass houses are a little higher and more frail than others, and certainly the Muslims are more irrational than the Jews, no question, no doubt.
But it's going to be rather hard for the Jews to sort of fundamentally attack Islam, or fundamentally, I mean, not physically, but sort of morally or intellectually, which is the basis for the physical attacks at all times.
It's going to be rather hard for the Jews to attack Islam without also not becoming Jews.
To sort of fundamentally and effectively reject Islam, you also have to reject Islam.
Well, Judaism, right?
I mean, that sort of makes sense, right?
I mean, if irrational absolutes are bad, and that makes the Muslims corrupt and nasty, then irrational absolutes are bad.
If you say your irrational absolutes are bad, and mine are not as bad, right, then you're saying slave owners should be nicer, right?
Which, you know, maybe you can achieve in some way, shape, or form, but I don't think it would be a very effective way of Of really being...
fighting the problems associated with and involved with slavery.
And I also remembered, again, no personal validation of any of this stuff, but I did bring up, and I do remember...
Whenever you see the horn, you just wait for the airplane to come into your car.
Boy, that would be a pretty impressive way to end the series, wouldn't it?
But... I read a book called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which is an agonizing book to read.
But in it, there's a fairly lengthy description of Jewish soldiers sniping away at Palestinian children.
And who are behind a fence, right?
So it's not like the Jewish soldiers are in danger.
They're just taking pot shots and, you know, casually murdering the Palestinian children.
Is it true? I have no idea.
Is it conceivable? Well, of course it is.
Of course it is. Irrational cults with guns do bad things.
The government, religions, races, Nazis.
To me, this is not inconceivable that people who have irrational absolutes, who have guns and who face no consequences for their actions, are going to do bad things.
That's an inevitable brew.
There's just no way that that's not going to happen.
You can just look up Milgram's famous prison experiment if you have any doubts about that.
So, he didn't respond to that.
I assume that there was some fact-checking that went into the book, that war is a force that gives us meaning, but I have no way of verifying it or not verifying it.
So, to me, at least it's a question.
And it's certainly, it's as valid a proposition as the proposition that Jews do good things in a difficult situation.
And that Israel is an amazing anomaly among states.
States that are surrounded by enemies that they voluntarily chose to put themselves among.
That have the power of taxation and control over the economy, and of course, although the Israeli economy is a complete basket case, and without the billions and billions of American aid, it would have folded long ago.
In other words, it would have had to be liberalized a little bit more.
As Noam Chomsky has said, and he studied this obviously a hell of a lot more than I have, that Israel has traded security for expansion, right?
So Israel is expanding into the Gaza Strip and so on.
So, Israel has chosen expansion over security, and of course the Israeli argument is that there is no security in the current situation, and expansion is the only hope, and blah blah blah.
But, you know, that's only true if you forget the fact that Israel could have got a canton from Switzerland or bought a large tract of land in Brazil and not be surrounded by Muslims and could have lived its life in, you know, pretty significant peace, right?
But they wanted to be where they were for irrational culty reasons.
This is the land promised to us by blah blah blah Abraham and so on.
And so, you know, they kind of got themselves into this mess.
They certainly knew that even if they were enemies of Islam, it wouldn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that if you want to...
If you want to make sure that Islam is going to grow, what you do is stick a bunch of historical enemies into their midst and get them to fight a lot of wars between them.
That is going to absolutely cement Islam.
I mean, it's just important to understand what Israel did, not just for the Jews or to the Jews or about the Jews, but what it did to the Muslims.
Right? Right? The fact that Israel planted itself right in the middle of the Middle East, right among all of the Islamic countries, has done an enormous amount to ensure that the Muslims will never become free while that situation occurs.
It's a little bit more than just about Israel, in my mind.
It's about all of the billions of people, or I guess it's about a billion people, Who are enslaved under Islamic theocracies.
And the fact that Israel chose to plant itself there has meant that these people can be raised with an immediate enemy.
It means that there's a constant enemy to blame for all of the problems in the Muslim world.
It means that the Muslim leaders have an enormous propaganda tool.
To turn the anger and frustration of their population outward.
I mean, it's not just about the Jews, it's also about the Muslims, and the existence of Israel has caused an exacerbated radicalism and the domination of innocent civilians in the Muslim world.
I think that's fairly important.
And there doesn't seem to be a lot of sympathy for that, in my sort of humble opinion, because then the central question sort of comes back, well, why are they different?
So I asked this guy, so some sort of Muslim baby is taken and goes to live with Israeli parents.
Does that person then become sort of a radical, crazed Islamic nutjob?
Or does the person grow up with sort of, you know, the values that are in the Jewish society, in Israel, and so on?
So, you know, what's the big difference between these two children?
One who grows up in Israel, genetically identical, and the one that grows up In Morocco or Syria or something like that.
Of course, you can't really claim that there's a genetic difference, right?
Because if there's a genetic difference, then any kind of enmity or hostility is completely irrational.
It's like thinking that you're virtuous because you're really tall and somebody has some genetic dwarfing or stunting disease who's ended up really short.
And it's sort of like saying, well, I'm a good guy.
I'm moral because I'm tall, which was purely accidental and genetic.
And you, my friend, are evil because you were struck with this disease that you had no control over.
That would be completely irrational, right?
In order to hate another group, You have to give them moral responsibility for them to be bad.
For you to be good and for them to be bad, you have to have chosen your ethics.
You have to have voluntarily subscribed to something that's good, and the other person has to voluntarily subscribe to something that's bad.
And then there's moral responsibility.
Let's just say everything is environmental.
I'm not arguing that it is, but let's just say for a moment that everything is environmental.
Then the degree of moral responsibility will certainly vanish.
So then saying that the Muslims are bad is irrelevant.
It's irrational.
It's wrong. It's bad to say that.
It's incorrect.
Because if everyone who grows up among the Muslims becomes a Muslim...
And is tribally bound to the Muslims and either is a crazy extremist or a crazy apologist or a crazy, crazy whatever, whatever.
Then getting angry at the Muslims, it's just a meme, it's an idea that's simply replicating through child abuse over and over and over again.
So there's no point getting angry.
What you have to do is educate.
But you can't educate...
The Muslims, without looking your own hypocrisy in the face, right?
So you can't say, your crazy irrational tribe is bad, my crazy irrational tribe is good, right?
Because then what's the difference?
The only difference is that you're over there and we're over here.
And then all you end up doing is making up a bunch of distinctions.
And... From that standpoint, of course, Judaism, yeah, sure, it's more civilized now than Islam, but the damn belief is 5,000 years old, and you could say, really, that only in the last couple of hundred years has it become less deranged, right?
If you look at the Old Testament, it's the primary Jewish text, it's insane!
And yes, The Jews no longer believe the Old Testament texts with the kind of rigid absolutism that they did throughout most of their history, certainly before the advent of Christ and throughout a good chunk of the Dark and Middle Ages.
Yes, I perfectly understand that the Jews do not believe that stuff anymore, most of them, but that's not because there was reform within, that's just because there was civilizing rationality and scientific approaches from outside.
It wasn't like science was led by some sort of revolution in the Jewish world.
Science was led by a revolution in the world of science.
Philosophers, rationally, blah, blah, blah.
You know all this sort of stuff.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Israel is less evil than Iran.
Sure, let's go with that as a premise.
But why? But why?
Is it because the Jews are smarter?
Well, then you can't get angry at the Muslims for being evil.
Because it's just like getting angry at a child who's two for not being able to dance the tango.
Not capable. No point, right?
Is it because the Jews happen to have grown up in a more secular, relaxed, vaguely capitalist, although largely socialist, society that values rationality and so on?
Well, then it's just a matter of environment, and you can't also then get angry at the Muslims.
Right? And of course, the way that these groups work is that they hate themselves, right?
I mean, this is sort of very, very basic.
And this is more on the Muslim side than on the Jewish side, right?
The Muslims hate themselves, and they know why they hate themselves, because they're irrational cultists with no intellectual or moral integrity, and they're slaves, and they're slaves mostly in their own minds, more so than in their circumstances.
And so they hate themselves for their cowardice and their conformity and their irrationality and their fear, and And they're slavery.
And they can't go to the root and say, well, it's because, you see, we have all these crazy beliefs and my family abused me by telling me and it's all nonsense and we need to clear the air and get new beliefs and be more rational and blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, of course, sadly, that isn't really what tends to occur, right?
What tends to occur is that the self-hatred that they have for their conformity They end up spewing out onto other people, right?
They spew it out onto other people because they hate themselves for their conformity, but they project that self-hatred onto other people and end up hating other people that they view as conformists.
You know, the Jews on the Muslims and the Muslims on the Jews and everybody on everybody.
This is all, you know, this is a natural result of irrationality.
When you choose irrationality, you choose this.
It's absolutely inevitable.
There's no way that it could be different.
There's no way that it ever will be different until we recognize this and get the hell out of this crazy world of irrational absolutes and give up our culture and give up our history and give up all of the crazy shit that our forefathers told us and look at the world and think for ourselves, then we can become free of this kind of stuff.
But until then, we will continue to bomb and hate each other from here to kingdom come, and only when we are able to actually figure out that the people that we need to deal with and the irrationality that we need to deal with is actually within our own hearts,
then, and only then, will the world become a peaceful and wonderful place But until then, we just have to live with all of these people talking about how great their irrational cult is and how bad everybody else's irrational cult is and ending up enforcing that with bombs and guns and tortures and chambers and sexual assault and rape and the abuse of children.
All the kind of stuff that you can imagine.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I look forward to your donations. Thank you so much to those who subscribed up to the 17 or 18 bucks a month, which you can do on the website at www.freedomainradio.com.
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